Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol. III:Creation and Redemption

(Nordland Publishing Company:Belmont, Mass., 1976), pp. 95-159.[In the Nordland ed., the footnotes were all located atthe end. Quotations from the Greek have here beentransliterated.]

I. The Incarnation and Redemption

“THE WORD BECAME FLESH”: in this is the ultimate joy of the Christian faith. In this is thefulness of Revelation. The Same Incarnate Lord is both perfect God and perfect man. The fullsignificance and the ultimate purpose of human existence is revealed and realized in andthrough the Incarnation. He came down from Heaven to redeem the earth, to unite man withGod for ever. “And became man.” The new age has been initiated. We count now the

“anni Domini.”

As St. Irenaeus wrote: “the Son of God became the Son of Man, that man also mightbecome the son of God.”

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Not only is the original fulness of human nature restored or re-established in the Incarnation. Not only does human nature return to its once lost communionwith God. The Incarnation is also the new Revelation, the new and further step. The first Adamwas a living soul. But the last Adam is the Lord from Heaven [1 Cor. 15:47]. And in theIncarnation of the Word human nature was not merely anointed with a superabundantoverflowing of Grace, but was assumed into an intimate and hypostatical unity with the Divinityitself. In that lifting up of human nature into an everlasting communion with the Divine Life, theFathers of the early Church unanimously saw the very essence of salvation, the basis of thewhole re-

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deeming work of Christ. “That is saved which is united with God,” says St. Gregory of Nazianzus. And what was not united could not be saved at all. This was his chief reason for insisting, against Apollinarius,

in the Incarnation. This was the fundamental motive in the whole of early theology, in St.Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and St. Maximus theConfessor. The whole history of Christological dogma was determined by this fundamentalconception: the Incarnation of the Word as Redemption. In the Incarnation human history iscompleted. God’s eternal will is accomplished, “the mystery from eternity hidden and to angelsunknown.” The days of expectation are over. The Promised and the Expected has come. Andfrom henceforth, to use the phrase of St. Paul, the life of man “is hid with Christ in God” [Col.3:3]....The Incarnation of the Word was an absolute manifestation of God. And above all it was arevelation of Life. Christ is the Word of Life,

ho Logos tês zôês

... “and the life was manifested,and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which waswith the Father, and was manifested unto us” [1 John 1:1-2].

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The Incarnation is the quickeningof man, as it were, the resurrection of human nature. But the climax of the Gospel is the Cross,the death of the Incarnate. Life has been revealed in full through death. This is the paradoxicalmystery of the Christian faith: life through death, life from the grave and out of the grave, themystery of the life-bearing grave. And we are born to real and eternal life only through our baptismal death and burial in Christ; we are regenerated with Christ in the baptismal font. Suchis the invariable law of true life. “That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die” [1 Cor.15:36].“Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh” [1 Timothy 3:16]. But Godwas not manifest

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in order to recreate the world at once by the exercise of His omnipotent might, or to illuminateand transfigure it by the overwhelming light of His glory. It was in the uttermost humiliation thatthis revelation of Divinity was wrought. The Divine will does not abolish the original status of human freedom or “self-power” [

to autexousion

], it does not destroy or abolish the “ancient lawof human freedom.”

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Herein is revealed a certain self-limitation or

“kenosis”

of the Divine might.And more than that, a certain

kenosis

of Divine Love itself. Divine love, as it were, restricts andlimits itself in the maintenance of the freedom of the creation. Love does not impose the healingby compulsion as it might have done. There was no compelling evidence in this manifestation of God. Not all recognized the Lord of Glory under that “guise of the servant” He deliberately tookupon Himself. And whosoever did recognize, did so not by any natural insight, but by therevelation of the Father [cf. Matt. 16:17]. The Incarnate Word appeared on earth as man amongmen. This was the redeeming assumption of all human fulness, not only of human nature, butalso of all the fulness of human life. The Incarnation had to be manifested in all the fulness of life, in the fulness of human ages, that all that fulness might be sanctified. This is one of theaspects of the idea of the “summing up” of all in Christ

was no reduction of His Divinity, which in theIncarnation continues unchanged,

aneu tropês.

It was, on the contrary, a lifting-up of man, the“deification” of human nature, the

“theosis.”

As St. John Damascene says, in the Incarnation“three things were accomplished at once: the assumption, the existence, and the deification of humanity by the Word.”

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It must be stressed that in the Incarnation the Word assumes theoriginal human nature, innocent and free from original sin,

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without any stain. This does not violate the fulness of nature, nor does this affect the Saviour’slikeness to us sinful people. For sin does not belong to human nature, but is a parasitic andabnormal growth. This point was vigorously stressed by St. Gregory of Nyssa and particularly bySt. Maximus the Confessor in connection with their teaching of the will as the seat of sin.

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In theIncarnation the Word assumes the first-formed human nature, created “in the image of God,”and thereby the image of God is again re-established in man.